Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to a method and computer program product for configuring a virtual array site on a remote server to provide on-demand storage capacity to a customer.
Description of the Related Art
Computers, and accompanying data storage, are commonplace in today's society. Individuals, businesses, organizations, and the like have a need for a certain amount of data storage. Historically, data has been stored on local storage devices, such as tape drives, hard disk drives (HDDs), and removable media such as compact discs (CDs) and digital versatile discs (DVDs). As more of society becomes digital, the need for data storage has generally increased. As the need for data storage and data redundancy has proliferated, storage devices have been implemented in various sites. In some cases, the data storage is maintained in multiple storage servers as part of multiple data storage subsystems.
Occasionally, it is beneficial to be able to redirect commands from one storage server to another. Examples include commands that require configuration commands to be executed on one server, or machine, and the setup of copy services commands on a separate machine. An example of this scenario is a method in which a user requests an offsite machine to be used as a backup for a range of storage volumes. In this case, the user must first open a session to the primary machine, and then query the volumes to be configured. As a next step, the user must open a session to the secondary machine, and configure target volumes (which will be used to hold the backup data) based on the volume attributes retrieved from the primary machine. Finally, the user must open a session again to the primary machine (or reuse the original session) and execute a command that initiates the copy from the source to the target volumes.